How goes Donald Trump’s war on democracy and free speech at home and abroad? Very well, it appears – especially as three examples in the past few days alone show how easy it is when the tech bros are prepared to do pretty much all your bidding for you.
At the weekend, Instagram, owned by Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, shut down the Instagram profile of No Kings, a US-wide coalition of pro-democracy protests outraged at Trump’s increasingly monarchical style. The movement’s account disappeared for several hours while protests focused on increasing early voter turnout in next month’s midterm elections were underway.
Senator Bernie Sanders said that “billionaire ownership of the media” was behind the suspension, while Connecticut senator Chris Murphy called for an investigation into the incident, saying it was an indictment of Meta’s “outsized influence” on US culture and politics.
“An investigation is warranted, at the very least, to understand why Meta (which effectively functions these days as a private government) was unable to protect protest against Trump, while it spends so much time trying to get close to Trump,” he wrote.
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Meta, for its part, blamed the account’s temporary suspension on an automated action triggered “when accounts post, share or comment at very high frequencies”. Sceptical organisers said members “posted only a handful of times and livestreamed to thousands”.
Meanwhile in Brazil, where the country is in the middle of a presidential election campaign, Meta has also been forced to deny political bias towards Trump’s favoured candidate Flávio Bolsonaro after the campaign of his rival, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, accused it of using biased algorithms and AI restrictions to favour Bolsonaro.
Brazil’s electoral court has now ruled the platform must give equal treatment to both candidates. But amazingly, once again it transpires Instagram and Facebook’s preference for Bolsonaro were not down to him being Trump’s favourite – or indeed Lula’s attempts to regulate social media – but “unrelated global technical glitches, strict anti-fraud measures and regulatory compliance rather than targeted suppression”.
A reminder that when Zuckerberg threw in his lot with Trump in 2025 and sacked most of his content regulators he said it was because “factcheckers have just been too politically biased” and he wanted to “work with President Trump to push back on governments around the world that are going after American companies and pushing to censor more”.
And back in America, another tech titan, TikTok, has been very generously helping out a rival and Trump supporter in X owner Elon Musk, suspending an account promoting a new critical film about the far right entrepreneur.
The distributor of Musk, Bleecker Street, was informed of a “permanent suspension” on Friday, claiming that its political content violated its policies. Its native, unpaid TikTok account – a status that allows more leeway on “political content” – remained active, although Bleecker Street was not allowed to pay to boost its content.
On Sunday morning, TikTok informed Bleecker Street that the account had been reinstated as a spokesperson cited – guess what? – an “error” as the reason for the suspension. The film company remained frustrated, however, that much of the weekend passed without the chance to promote the movie on the platform, given that weekends are when films make most of their money.
TikTok has no official affiliation with Elon Musk, though it is partly owned by octogenarian billionaire Larry Ellison. By a remarkable coincidence, one moment in Musk shows a text from him to the Tesla man offering to pay him billions to help fund his acquisition of Twitter.
That free speech thing all seems to be going pretty well, then!
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